After The Fire
by Chris7221
Summary: When Shepard was Lyanna's age, she burned down a barn. It's not exactly the same as running off with a prince, setting off a war, and almost dying in childbirth, but maybe telling the story will help anyway. Oneshot. No, I don't know why I wrote this either.


I'm still not sure why I wrote this. I mean, I've written some strange shit over the years, but a Lyanna+Femshep character piece is at least in the top three.

This would have been part of a Game of Thrones/Mass Effect crossover I probably won't ever get around to. The premise is basically your bog-standard "space traveler lands on primitive world" affair, and I don't have much in the way of details worked out besides that she lands in the North just before Robert's Rebellion, befriends Lyanna Stark among others, and reluctantly participates in the Rebellion mostly to rescue Lyanna and keep Robert and Ned from getting themselves killed.

This will have some strong language- Shepard is a sailor, after all- and stupid teenaged shenanigans including drug and alcohol use.

* * *

Lyanna had been ready to die in the Tower of Joy.

It had been a fairy tale gone terribly wrong. She thought she had run off to freedom with the man of her dreams, until one thing after another went badly and she was left along, separated from all she had known and loved, bleeding to death. When Ned arrived, seemingly by miracle, she knew it was already too late. So many had died because of her, and finally, it was her time too. She handed Aegon to Ned, made him promise to keep him safe no matter what, and prayed to the Seven.

And then that crazy woman from the stars- Commander Jane Shepard, the lady who acted like a king and wore armor and carried a sword and a crossbow that used gravity instead of springs and had been like a favourite aunt to her if only for a few months - said _not today_, stuck her with something like a needle that burned, and gave her blood from her own veins.

Reflexively, she scratched at the bandaged area where the tube had gone under her skin.

Now she was alive, on a cart following Ned and Howland northbound with Shepard beside her, still dressed in her odd grey armor, with Aegon Jon in the back. She owed the strange woman her life, yet Lyanna Stark couldn't even muster an expression of gratitude.

Finally, the red-haired woman broke the silence. She stated flatly, "I burned down a barn."

With no context given, Lyanna had no idea what to make of that. "Huh?"

"When I was your age, I burned down a barn," she clarified. "Well, not a barn, exactly. It was a hydroponic algae growing facility. Big tanks of blue-green slime, kinda like little plants, you give them sunlight and nutrients and they grow. Then these big arms with scoops on them come down and scoop out the slime, it gets mixed with flavourings to make it a little more palatable and then printed into… you're not getting any of this, are you?"

"No," Lyanna admitted quietly.

"Yeah, okay." It didn't surprise Shepard that her explanation had gone right over the girl's head. Lyanna was sharp, and fairly well educated by this world's standards, but she was still trying to explain 22nd century agricultural to someone from a world that had yet to invent the seed drill. "Let's just go with barn, it sounds better anyway."

The Stark girl nodded in reply.

"When I was your age, I burned down a barn," the Commander repeated. "We were on Benning at the time. My mom was redeployed every so often, so it meant making new friends every few years. It was me, Ali, Sandra, Ian, and… what was her name… Mikiko, I think. Ali was the coolest guy in the school, because he'd convinced his older brother to buy booze and drug for him. Where I come from you have to be 18 to buy that stuff and we were fourteen, fifteen. None of us had tried any of this stuff before, and we were super excited, just waiting for the right time.

"Friday night, all our parents are at some boring political event we didn't care about," She laughed. "I think it was actually a major debate for the upcoming gubernatorial election. The only important thing to us at the time was that all our parents were otherwise occupied and we were free to do whatever the fuck we wanted. And what we wanted to do was be idiot teenagers pretending to be adults."

She barked a harsh laugh, accompanied by a mischievous smirk. "So we're loaded with way more beer, liquor, weed and trip then we can ever possibly handle. Sandra's already picked out a quiet spot, just out of town in one of those 'barns'. A quiet little kind of loft above one of the algae tanks, I think it was a maintenance access for the stirrer or something. On this particular building, the locks were all broken so we could just waltz right in."

"Waltz right in?" Lyanna asked, confused by the turn of phrase.

"Ah, it's an old metaphor. I think a waltz is some kind of dance. It means we could walk in easily, without anyone bothering us," Shepard explained. She cast her companion a concerned glance. "Hey, you feeling okay? Any dizziness, chills, pain?"

"No," the girl answered. She took a shaky, nervous breath, trying to take stock of her body. "I still feel weak and tired, but I don't feel worse than yesterday."

"That's to be expected, you lost a lot of blood. But it's _probably_ not a reaction. You're _probably_ Rh positive." With a flick of her hand, Shepard brought up the glowing display of her omni-tool above her wrist. She flicked through a few pages of information, frowned, and mentioned, "You could still have a delayed hemolytic reaction. Especially since it was my blood, which is not exactly normal. God only knows what _else_ is in my blood besides blood cells. And that's all assuming there are no major differences in Terran biology and your own."

Lyanna gulped.

"Look on the bright side, you might develop superpowers," Shepard quipped, closing the display with a gesture. Seeing the horrified expression on her companion's face, she quickly apologized. "Sorry. Look, you beat the odds already, you're probably fine. It's been twenty-four hours so you're _probably_ in the clear."

She only understood about half the words the lady from space used at the best of times, but the ones she _did_ get made her nervous. "Can you keep going with the story?"

"Sure." Shepard gave a reassuring smile before continuing.

"So we're settled in. We have our private little abode, we start cracking open our ill-gotten goods. Ali wants to try weed first- he claims he's part Rastafarian but we're pretty sure he's full of shit. So he lights up a bong, takes a hit, nearly coughs up a lung but pretends he likes it." She laughed, shaking her head at the memory. "Sandra and I grab a beer each, because we've seen all these cool people drinking beer in the vids and we want to be like them. It tastes fucking horrible but we pretend we like it, because we want to be cool."

"That was your first time drinking beer?" the Stark girl asked, somewhat surprised.

She nodded. "It was our first time. I know you get started early here, but we stopped doing that centuries ago. Booze is kind of a rite of passage into adulthood, and this was our first time. Meanwhile, Mikiko pours out this little shot glass-" she holds her fingers about an inch apart- "'bout this big, of vodka. Beer- our beer or yours- is about five percent alcohol, vodka is forty."

"Alcohol?"

"The part that makes you drunk. So Mikiko's little glass is about the same as our cans of beer, and she downs it in one go. Coughs like hell, but yeah, she's pretending she enjoys it, too. It all tastes like shit to us but we act like we like it." She shook her head. It was so stupid in retrospect- but that was the point. "We're young, we're dumb, we're having a good time."

"And then Ian starts tripping, hard. He started with trip and a fucking _lot_ of trip- the point of this story is not 'don't do drugs, kids' but do _not_ take more than one pill on your first try- and he's completely out of it. He's seeing ghosts and fairies and flashing lights. He's having an awesome time for about five minutes while we try to figure out what to do next."

Skeptically, Lyanna asked, "There weren't actually fairies, were there?"

"No, of course not, it's just the drugs that Ian's taken. He's the only one seeing them, it's all in his head." She taps the side of her head with a gloved finger for emphasis. "Anyway, this goes fine for about five minutes, and then he starts getting paranoid. He thinks there's bugs, he thinks there's mechanical bugs, he thinks we're getting attacked by sky beams and he's convinced the dome is coming down on top of us."

"That doesn't sound fun at all. Why would people take this… trip?" the girl asked, confused. She blinked, trying get the story with all its strange words and ideas straight in her head. "Trip is the substance _and_ the experience, right?"

"Right. It _can_ be a lot of fun. _If_ you're a responsible adult who can measure out a proper dose, you have the right environment and someone to guide you through the trip." Shepard sighed. "None of which we had that night. We were laughing our asses off until the moment Ian lost his shit and started smashing up the pipes beside us. Just grabbed this big wrench and started beating the shit out of them."

She paused again and shook her head ruefully. "That's kind of when everything went to hell. Once Ian broke a hole in the pipes, they started gushing this green liquid, and this yellowish gas started filling the air. It stank like… like festering corpses mixed with burning metal and it stung like hell to breathe. And that was pretty much when we realized we fucked up."

"So, what did you do?"

"We ran like hell!" Shepard exclaimed. "Mikiko and Ali just bolted for the door. Sandra was vapor locked, total deer in the headlights, and Ian was still high as a kite. I shouted at Sandra to run, grabbed Ian, and then I was out too. I remember vividly tripping over something and almost falling into one of the puddles of green shit, but it didn't matter to me at the time, we just knew we had to get the hell out of there before we died or somebody killed us."

"And what happened next?" Lyanna asked, awaiting every word with bated breath.

"We made it out of the barn, coughing our lungs out and feeling like we'd been hit over the head, maybe because of the fumes or maybe because we'd had way more than we could handle," she continued, voice rapid and intense. "And then, basically the moment we get out the door- believe it or not, I'm not making this up, it was _right at that moment_\- this big fucking plume of fire shoots up through the roof of the barn, right above where we'd broken those pipes. We didn't stick around to watch, just got the hell out of there. Next day on the news vids, it had burned completely down."

The Commander paused and shook her head. "God, we were stupid."

"Didn't Ian start the fire, though?" her companion pointed out.

Shepard tilted her hand in a gesture of _maybe, maybe not_. "Remember that thing I tripped over and knocked into the puddle? That was Ali's bong. _I_ was the one who knocked a lit bong into a puddle of flammable chemicals."

"What's a bong?"

"It's, uh, it's a water pipe. You put some weed, tobacco, or herbs in one end, light that up, suck the smoke up through the water," she tried to explain. Giving up and offering a shrug, she simplified, "There's fire involved."

"Ian was the one who broke the pipes, though." Lyanna reworded.

Shepard nodded a few times. She was serious now. "That's true. I always felt responsible for it, though. I know, it's stupid, if I hadn't tripped the fire probably would have started anyway, but I always felt responsible. Then again, just _being_ there was stupid. I guess the life advice I'd give here is to take responsibility for your actions, but take responsibility for _your_ actions."

Curious and engaged, Lyanna queried, "Did your parents find out? Were they angry?"

"Of course they found out. Hell, I almost got _arrested_," she answered, a slight smirk on her face. "And they were fucking _livid_. Well, kind of."

Shepard paused and took a deep breath. It wasn't a painful memory, at least not anymore, but it was an intense one. Finally, catching her companion's expectant gaze, she continued.

"My mom has a hell of a temper. Hannah Shepard yelled, a lot, especially back then. Age and a string of promotions tempered that a tad. I was used to it, my brother and sister were used to it, her subordinates were used to it. I was expecting her to give me the dressing down of my fucking life," she explained. "But she didn't. She just sat down with me, and we had a calm and frank conversation. That was honestly a lot more terrifying than being yelled at. It was just so unexpected."

"What did she say to you?"

"Every decision you make has consequences you are responsible for. If you decide to act like stupid kids out of a cliched old vid, you will not have a good time. A night of quote-unquote fun could end with you in the slammer or face-down in a ditch. You probably figured that out though, so think next time and don't do it again," Shepard recollected seriously. "She'd rather I didn't burn down the barn in the first place, of course, but she wanted to make damn good and sure I learned a lesson from it. And I did. I've done some things I regret, I've made some mistakes, but I've always tried to think them through first."

"Anyway, the next day, I walked into the police station with a full statement and a written apology," she continued, a tinge of pride in her voice. "I was terrified, but at the same time it felt right. _This_ was the real rite of passage. _This_ was adulthood."

Lyanna wasn't sure if it was truly appropriate to ask, but curiosity got the better of her. "So what happened? Were you locked up?"

"Nope. Ian had influential parents and they swept the whole thing under the rug," She shook her head and snorted, though there was a smirk on her face. "That's when I got my first experience with graft and corruption, too."

"Oh." The girl's voice was heavy with disappointment.

"Yeah, it's a shitty end to the story, kind of anticlimactic, isn't it?" Shepard asked rhetorically. "Not everything ends nice and clean and happy. More often than not it's a muddled mess where things go sideways for no apparent reason. But I think I'm preaching to the choir there."

Lyanna nodded in agreement, even though she wasn't entirely sure what that idiom meant. She sighed and stared at the ground. "Burning down a barn isn't the same as a starting a war."

"No, not even close," Shepard agreed. She paused, trying to think of some other, more destructive example of teenaged stupidity. "There _was_ this spoiled brat on Luna - my homeworld's moon. Don't remember his name, but I think he was from one of the big rich families, maybe Weyland, Tunt, or Mao. Took his brand new racing pinnace and slammed it right into an agro dome." She gestured a smashing motion with her arm. "Killed himself and a couple dozen others, trashed every crop in the dome and did a couple hundred million credits worth of damage."

"Still not a war," Lyanna said sadly.

"Hey, remember what I said about taking responsibility for your actions?" the woman repeated. "I don't really blame you for not wanting to marry Robert. Any arranged marriage at fifteen is bullshit, and Robert's an asshole. Running off with Rhaegar was understandable, if still brash, impulsive and stupid. But he baited you; hook, line, and sinker. Getting yourself knocked up almost killed you, but that's more to do with this planet's level of medicine than anything. On a civilized world it's _bad_ but not usually not _deadly_.

"It's not your fault that Rhaegar decided to keep everything under wraps so nobody knows what the fuck was going on. It's not your fault that the late King was a crazy fucker who thought burning people was fun. It's not your fault that neither your honorable-to-a-fault brother nor your dumbass husband-to-be understands that discretion is the better part of valour."

"You probably should have thought it through better, but some of these things you had no idea about. You did a stupid, but so did everyone else," the Commander concluded. She shrugged. "When you're young, you do stupid things, usually for stupid reasons. If that's enough to plunge the kingdom into war, then something was already horribly wrong to begin with."

Lyanna took a moment to process that. Being the fire that tore through Westeros was something she couldn't live with. Being the spark that lit the fire… she regretted that, but not all of it was her fault. She had to be better, but she hadn't been the only one to make mistakes.

Finally, Lyanna managed, "Thank you."

"It's no big deal," Shepard replied dismissively, in her typically sardonic, not-quite-truly-humble way. She shrugged and offered a smile. "Just try to not fuck things up next time."


End file.
